


Special Circumstances I: A Show of Power

by Viridian5



Series: Dark Angel [1]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Dark fic, Drama, Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1998-03-24
Updated: 1998-03-24
Packaged: 2017-10-02 08:19:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Viridian5/pseuds/Viridian5
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What was going on with Mulder while he was in the hospital?  Also the different factions of the Consortium spin their many webs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Special Circumstances I: A Show of Power

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for "The Unusual Suspects." That means this is 1989, folks.
> 
> Warning: There's a bit of nastiness in here involving CancerMan. It may not make you happy...
> 
> For those of you familiar with my slash work (and this one isn't slash), yes, Danielle Morley will later be known as [Dark Angel](http://archiveofourown.org/en/series/276).

Fox Mulder's hoarse voice mumbled incoherently, his ruined throat having forced him to abandon screaming, as he strained against the padded cuffs that kept him shackled to the hospital bed. His struggles had made his hospital gown ride up, revealing a great deal, but the agent didn't seem to notice. His bloodshot eyes stared with fear but little comprehension at his visitor.

The EH had left the agent with hallucinations, paranoia, and an almost total loss of motor coordination. Too high a concentration for the subtle effects the Consortium preferred. But what the visitor saw now had its possibilities.

Even as the visitor smirked at the sight of his old friend's son in such a state, he fumed at what the Consortium thought it could reduce him to. Errand boy. Go to Baltimore and visit Fox Mulder while he's in a fine, suggestible state and lead him where we want him to go before we expunge the whole incident from his conscious mind. As if a man with his reach and power had nothing better to do.

They meant to show him his place. To define the limits of his power while flaunting the extent of theirs. Rule or be ruled.

He refused to buckle under to them. He knew he could find a way to take advantage of the situation and put his own mark on a young man that the Consortium had such grand plans for. He hadn't survived this long without a talent for salvaging what he could.

He looked with greater interest at the lithe and almost naked body pulling at the restraints. Bill's son, the child he chose to keep. Bill Mulder, who did the same things everyone else involved did but thought his little acts of passive-aggressive rebellion left him clean. Sometimes he wanted to shake his "old friend" out of that self-satisfied righteousness.

He knew what he could do to satisfy all his needs. An act of rebellion to the Consortium, a gesture of defiance at Bill, and a string he could pull on Consortium's next star pawn. Most of all, a show of power.

He looked at Fox Mulder. It was a shame the kid had to suffer for the sins of others, but that was life. He wouldn't consciously remember it anyway. It would just be something at the back of his mind, affecting his reactions.

Fox Mulder's visitor started to unbuckle his belt.

******************************************************

Special Agent Joseph Frank stalked back to the rental car with a folder and a small metal case in hand. Dan would be climbing the seats after waiting in the dark, literally and figuratively, so long. The thought made him smile grimly.

He got in and set the folder and case on Dan's lap. She looked at them for a moment, looked at him for another, then said in a world-weary tone, "Who do they want us to kill this time?"

Agent Frank smiled and started to drive. They had a schedule to keep.

Right now Special Agent Danielle Morley was dressed in a navy blue woman's pantsuit. Add in her wire frame glasses and smartly bobbed dark hair, and she looked like any normal professional woman. Anyone who looked into her green eyes right now or noticed the way she looked like she could spring at any moment would wonder with a shudder what that profession might be.

Frank felt that most men his age were set in their ways. At the tender age of 40, they thought they'd seen it all and knew how the world worked. They were idiots, and they'd never survive a day working one of the Special Circumstances fixer squads. The X-Files had no mercy for people set in their ways.

Those men would never accept such a young-looking agent and especially not a woman as an equal partner. They would never believe that the CIA had her working international hits at the age of fifteen and called her "Infant Death." In her twenties now, she had more kills than most of the people he knew, fellow 'Nam vets included, put together and worked for an alphabet soup of organizations in various capacities. He couldn't think of anyone he'd rather have at his back while facing some hyped-up creature of the night.

"No killing or fixing. That's already been done," Agent Frank said.

When Morley opened the case her eyes narrowed at the sight of the hypodermic needle and vial contained within. "I don't like the look of this, Joe. What's so important that they pulled us off the Thrillkiller and made us wait for an hour and a half?"

"One of R&amp;D's planned events got busted. They wanted to do a random test of some drug called EH. It stands for--"

"I know what it stands for. I went to an Arab country that will remain nameless to destroy a lab set up to manufacture EH for use on American citizens. I killed everyone who knew anything about it. Now our country is making EH and intends to use it on American citizens. What the hell is wrong with these people?"

"It's all in the folder, Dan. They want us to do our job without questions. As usual," Frank said, for lack of anything better to say.

"And we'll do what we usually do anyway, right?" Holding a small flashlight clamped between her teeth, she read through the papers with an amazing speed. She would retain it too, with her eidetic memory. She removed the flashlight from her mouth and said, "Joe, there really is something rotten going on here even besides the notion of testing that stuff in Baltimore. A clean-up crew sanitized the site. They left this one federal agent alive, so someone must want him to continue breathing, but they didn't administer an antidote for the EH overdose he took. They waited three hours, then called us in off of something else and made us wait forever before telling us to go into the hospital with the antidote for this guy. That's about four and a half hours on the concentration of EH he took... He may never be the same again."

"What do we do?" Occasionally Joe Frank thought that he and Dan might be doing a better job as monster killers by going after their bosses. Someday they would, when it stopped being more advantageous for them to work within the system. The carnage he imagined made him smile.

"Wing it, as usual. Go in and see."

******************************************************

Fox Mulder sobbed and pleaded the whole time, but, even if security or a nurse had been anywhere near the room to hear him, no one would have made anything of it. Fox Mulder had been screaming and raving for hours previous to this.

He found the kid's tears, entreaties, and struggling exciting. It made him even harder to fantasize about one day stopping Bill mid-lecture to tell him what a nice piece of ass his boy was. "You know where you are. You know what I am. You know why this is necessary," he said to Fox Mulder, punctuating each sentence with a thrust.

"How is this necessary?" Fox whimpered. His voice rasped.

His next thrust rammed Fox's head against the headboard. "Do we have to go through all of this again?"

"No! You're here, you're here…"

"Where are you!"

"The ship!"

"What am I!"

"A--alien!"

"WHY IS THIS NECESSARY!"

"The tests! The tests..."

Fox Mulder's visitor finished with a final shudder then got off the bed and dressed. "You've been a good boy," he said. "We'll clean you up and send you home." He wanted a cigarette so badly he could taste it.

******************************************************

Danielle Morley, case in hand, wandered the hospital halls looking for her appointment. She'd learned long ago that most people would let you go anywhere if you acted as if you had every right to be there. She looked ordinary and official and non-threatening. Her outfit, the non-prescription glasses she wore but didn't need, her haircut, and her walk all lied about her to everyone who saw her. Her jobs only offered her opportunities to be herself when she killed.

No killing or destruction this time. She felt almost disappointed.

Very few people challenged her on her way to the room. In fact, security and nurses got scarcer and scarcer the closer she came to her goal. She didn't like this at all.

She hated hospitals and doctors even more than most people did but couldn't remember why. Something in her lost childhood or long-ago abduction maybe. With alien implants in her brain and a realigned genetic structure, not to mention her amnesia about her childhood, she had more than enough reason to be leery of people tampering with her body.

When she opened the door and saw the agent, she knew something was horribly wrong. Fox Mulder stared at her as if she were the most frightening thing he'd ever seen. She took most of her orders from "Mr. Morley," and he wouldn't assign her anything that brought her in contact with Fox Mulder. Not when Morley kept trying to suggest that she might be Samantha Mulder.

Then she detected the scent of Mr. Morley's favorite cigarettes. He hadn't smoked in here but the stench lingered on his skin and clothing, which was enough for her sensitive nose to detect even after he left. Cigarettes and... The rage hit her like a fist to the gut. Morley had cleaned Mulder and the sheets up but not well enough to hide the scent from her genetically re-engineered sense of smell.

"Mulder," she said with a gentleness she didn't feel as she walked to the head of the bed. "Who was in here last?"

"They brought me back," he rasped. His eyes glittered, and he moved as if he hurt in a number of places.

"Who?"

Mulder looked around him as if afraid someone would hear. "The aliens," he whispered. "What else do you want me to say? I know what you are."

She struggled to think over the flood of anger. She had spoken with abductees and other victims of cruelly curious aliens. She had her own half-remembered experience. Aliens existed. But Mulder wasn't the victim of one of them.

"Mulder, listen to me." In his current state he had no choice. "I'm going to give you something that will make the pain go away. When you wake up you won't remember anything since the warehouse, and you'll be your old self again." That was a lie. A part of him would always remember. "A Detective Munch will ask you questions. He'll be abrasive as all hell, but he's a good cop. Tell him what you remember. Tell him the truth. The truth is very important." She held his arm steady against all his uncoordinated efforts to get it free and sank the needle in.

"The truth," he sighed as he finally plunged into a peaceful sleep.

In fifteen minutes Joe would show up as a representative of the Bureau and demand to see Mulder. By then Mulder would be lucid enough to be released. Once Joe finished the paperwork, it would be on to the Thrillkiller and then the next assignment. No questions, no regrets, no looking back.

No way.

As she left the room she already knew what she would have to do.

******************************************************

Joe Frank found her sitting in the car thirty minutes later staring into space. Never a good sign for her. He started to drive and trusted her to start the conversation.

"How was he?" she asked.

"Shaken but lucid," he answered then said, "That was Fox Mulder. Why were we assigned to Mulder?"

"Change is coming, Joe. What was set in motion today is going to get rid of us and Davidson and Podeszwa. No more X-Files fixer teams."

"Does the Consortium know about our creative re-interpretation of orders?"

"If they knew that, we would be dead, and they would start tracking down all the witnesses we hid. No, they're bringing Mulder up, and since he must never find out how the X-Files used to be handled, we all have to disappear."

"I don't get it."

"Joe, our supervisor raped Mulder and told him it was aliens."

"What?" He didn't ask how she knew. If she said she knew, she did. End of story.

"I'm pretty sure that the aliens part was in the script, but I think he improvised the rape. The Consortium sent us in, not Mr. Morley. He knows my triggers and my heightened senses. He doesn't want me anywhere near Fox Mulder. Thus, he didn't send us. I think they knew that he would try something like this."

"Then sent you after him to make sure punishment is delivered. By you."

"I think that's it."

"Shit. But part of our orders involved telling Mulder to forget everything that happened after his exposure to the EH."

"Memory is never destroyed, Joe, just hidden. I should know. While his conscious memory will go on as if nothing happened, part of Mulder will remember being tortured by aliens while another will remember being raped. I don't know what other effects that kind of traumatic, subconscious dissonance will have, but one will probably be an interest in the paranormal and extraterrestrial. That interest will inevitable lead to the X-Files, which seems to be where the Consortium wants him to go, for their own unknown reasons. If no one steps in to take the other team and us out of the way, Mulder will quickly learn all sorts of nasty things about the government he serves."

"How long do you think we have?"

"I have no idea."

"What now?"

She took a deep breath. "First we nail the Thrillkiller. Then we go back to Virginia, where I'll pay a visit to another monster preying on the innocent."

******************************************************

The last of his flunkeys had just left the meeting room when the door opened again. His mind had only enough time to register, "Alice Pryor," before something heavy thrown at great speed hit him in the gut. Gasping and moaning, he crumpled to the floor. He watched the marble ashtray she threw at him bounce off the floor.

She wore steel-toed black boots, black jeans, and the battered black leather jacket with duct tape over the scars. Her work gear. She topped it off with a look on her face that made him fear for his life.

She kicked him savagely in the gut, and he heard a rib snap. "I was in Baltimore. Guess what I found out about?"

"Alice--"

"Our bosses aren't happy with you doing your own thing to their fair-haired boy. That's why they sent me to deliver the antidote. You cleaned everything up nicely but not well enough to hide your little power trip from me."

"He won't remember--" he said then shrieked as she kicked him again.

"You know that's a lie. This isn't a tree-falling-in-the-forest question. If I knocked you out and killed you, you would still be dead, do you understand? Whether Mulder consciously remembers or not, you raped him, and I have a special place in my heart for rapists, as you well know. After all, my first kill was my own molester."

"They won't let you kill me. They still need me." He gasped and wheezed.

"All true. They want you to remember something, though. You're their employee. Start acting like it."

As she walked to the door, he said, "You're expendable, bitch. Don't ever forget how easily we can replace you."

"I suggest you remember that yourself. By the way, I would be careful if I were you. It sounds like you punctured a lung." She stepped out into the hall to find a small crew of paramedics waiting. Amazing how quickly someone figured out when she would get here. Her lip curled in disgust, she said, "He's in there. I think he needs you." Then she walked away.

******************************************************

Frank picked her up at the curb. She hurried into the car to get out of the rain. "We got a new assignment," he said.

"I'm overjoyed."

"I chose the one in Queens. It's not too far from the Queensboro Bridge. A short drive into Manhattan. I have the feeling there are some people you would want to visit."

She smirked at him. "Really? Why is that?"

"They figured he'd pull something like this but still delayed us long enough to make sure we wouldn't get there in time to stop it. You can't chastise them as harshly as you can him, but I can't see you being happy until we meet with them and tell them exactly what we think of them."

"Joe, how long have we been partners?"

"About a year and a half. Isn't it wonderful that you don't need to spell things out for me anymore?"

She looked at him and smiled. "You're a good man, Joe."

### End


End file.
